Imagined Live Set

In todays class with Jose we had an exercise to plan an imagined live performance, where we consider every aspect of it. As I’m very interested in performing and my portfolio project is somewhat inspired in my live work, questioning the aspects of a live set was a very beneficial thing.

My performance would be an electronic music live set, where I combined elements of experimental, drone, electroacoustic and noise, with rhythmic dance music and IDM. In such variating constantly the tone of my performance and the peaks of tension and release of it. Technically my set would consist of two things, my Octotrack sampler and my modular synthesiser. I will pass three voices from the modular into the the Octotrack where I can add effects and resample. Each voice will have its own function: I will have a bass that can easily shift into noise drones, then a granular sampler to create drones and weird electroacoustic sound, finally a percussion synth to do the rhythmic elements. In the Octotrack I will resample those voices as well as adding additional layers, like drums, melodies, drones to complement the granular synthesis. The Octotrack will also function as the master effect of the chain.

Ideally this performance is meant for a club like space, with loud speakers and a dark atmosphere. It is not going to be club music though, it will have very experimental elements that sometimes will shift into hypnotic repetitive music to ground the performance and keep the audience focused. I want to have both extremely peaceful moments and extremely overloaded moments, that shift the energy in a cohesive way.

During the performance I will manually present the sonic material, starting sequences or fading in sounds. I will also twitch knobs of the synthesiser to create variations and create tension. Finally I’ll use resampling to be able to transition from each part of the performance. There is a lot of risk involved as the modular synth can be quite unpredictable and the Octotrack sometimes is a bit difficult in the resampling process.

For my artist statement I would like as limited information as possible, as I want the sound to be as abstract as possible, without any links to other references. The audience would need to be people that are in the rave/club scene but that at the same time have an interest for experimental sound. I wan’t the audience to be standing and if they want they’re invited to dance and have fun. I think it’s important in my performance to grant freedom to people to move around, and allow them to explore the space, talk and socialise with each other. This important in my work because I want to break with the tendencies of the sound art cannon, that make the performance of sound very unaccessible to people not used to this style of art.

This session was very useful to get me thinking if I want to do a performance anytime soon. As well it made me think in what ways I could adapt my M4L device to be flexible to be used in both production and performance. I don’t have any concrete ideas yet how could achieve this, but probably when creating the device something might pop up.